Shorter's Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: "Arguing for the four-day work week”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2020

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Shorter, to talk about why we work 40 hours per week (2:30), why he wrote the book (4:50), why working less is gaining traction (8:00), why working too much is like smoking (9:00), the difficulty instituting shorter work weeks (11:00), how it can be done (18:00), fighting against the gig economy (22:15), why big companies would ever want to do this (26:45), whether this is different between generations (29:35), the power of mothers (31:55), why rest is key (5:20), the culture of overwork (38:10), partnering with automation (42:30), and getting unstuck from the 40-hour week (45:30).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In companies where you do four day weeks, you're looking for people who can ruthlessly prioritize.
0:08.3	Yeah.
0:08.5	Who can knock out the one thing and then the next thing and then the next.
0:12.2	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:13.0	Who have moms?
0:14.4	Yeah, exactly.
0:15.5	Right.
0:15.7	You know, who has that kind of time, that kind of time management skill and resilience?
0:19.6	It's mothers.
0:20.7	Yo, technology.
0:23.4	What is it all about?
0:29.7	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:37.5	I want to start this week with a question.
0:40.8	Do you work too much?
0:42.6	How many hours a week do you put in?
0:45.3	What if I told you that you're doing it wrong?
0:50.2	Given the levels of technology, automation, and general advances we have at our disposal in 2020,
0:56.8	you should be working no more than four days a week.
1:00.5	So not 40 hours, maybe 32, maybe 30.
1:04.5	At least, that is the argument of this week's guest, Alex Sujohn Kim Pang.
1:10.7	He's the author of a new book called Shorter. No prizes for
1:14.8	guessing what it's about. So what Alex did is he went around the world and he met companies in
	...

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